Happy full moon

Thursday August 6, 2009

Tonight is such a beautiful full moon, warm and honey-gold, and seemingly huge as it rises from the ocean to the east. My love and I watched it rising as we walked through the city to the Sydney Observatory, where we're doing an astronomy course, peeking eagerly between buildings to watch its golden path as it climbed above the harbour. When we got to Observatory Hill it was amazing – so big and beautiful and awe-inspiring. (Of course, it never is any bigger when it's near the horizon, it's just our brain tricking us because we believe that things get smaller as they move towards the horizon, that being the usual perspective, so when the moon is there we assume it must be smaller and our brain makes it look bigger to compensate – weird huh!) The little pic above left is the one I took with my phone, as I'd left my camera at home from shooting the night before. I thought I'd add it because although it's not a great shot it reminds me of exactly what it did look like.
Sadly we couldn't look at the moon through the telescopes because it would have blinded us, so much of the sun's light being reflected back off it, but we did get to see Jupiter and three of its moons, which was fascinating. (It has 63 "moons", but four main ones.) With the naked eye it just looks like a big star twinkling below the moon, but up close through the telescope it was so beautiful, and distinctive, with its streaks of dark clouds circling the planet and its tiny little moons. Jupiter is the fifth planet from the sun and the largest in our solar system, and it's usually the fourth brightest object in our sky, after the sun, the moon and Venus. At the moment it's appearing to move backwards (eastward, in retrograde), but that's only because we're currently overtaking it as we orbit around the sun :-)
We also got to see Alpha Centauri through the telescope. It's the brightest star in our sky, although it's really two stars, and looked so beautiful against the sparkling web of tiny stars twinkling around it.

I'm a bit sidetracked by the wonder of the whole night sky right now :-) You can download a free map of the night sky here, for either the northern or southern hemispheres, and also buy great astronomy books, charts and products. And if you wanted to know more about the full moon, I posted some info here...

To return to the Blog homepage, click here.

To return to the Main homepage, click here.

Seven Sacred Sites and A Magical Journey are available from bookstores across Australia, distributed by Brumby Books, and through this website.

Send Serene an email.